Features

To most, beauty pageants are just a fairy tale, something every little girl dreams about when she is a kid: all the glamor, the excitement and the dedication to a cause to help the in-need. For most, this dream dies when real life begins, but for Saratoga High alumnus, Shveta Agrawal, this dream has turned into reality.

Last summer, Agrawal was chosen to become a member of the 2011 Donald Trump’s Miss California USA competition, which takes place November 19-21 in Palm Springs. She will be taking the stage with the title “Miss South Bay.”

Imagine that your family has just moved to foreign country and you've been enrolled in school there. Every day you struggle to try to learn literature and history in classes taught exclusively in an alien language. Now imagine the situation reversed and you have an average day in the life of a foreign student at SHS. In addition to the normal challenges of high school, these students have to deal with being thrust into a new culture, bombarded with a new language and surrounded by a completely unfamiliar environment.

Sophomore Justin Ra is part of part of an influx of students who are moving to Saratoga High from all over the world. School registrar Jeanne Jamieson said 50 students have come to the school from other countries since 2008.

Their reasons for coming here are as diverse as the countries they come from. Some come in search of a better education; others are displaced from their home countries because of their parents' jobs. Regardless of their reasons, they all share one thing in common: the myriad of obstacles that confront them.

The average junior has probably had three teachers for each subject or maybe fewer. I doubt, though, that many students have so far had five teachers for one subject the way I have.

One day toward the end of first semester in my sophomore English class last year, my teacher was not present in class nor the next day, nor the day after that. My class wasn't told a word about the disappearance, and then we entered a phase of about three rotating substitutes. As the weeks stretched on, we began to worry about what might have happened to our teacher.

Pulling her Audi convertible into the school parking lot, junior Mei Gao is ready to start the day. Struggling to hold her various textbooks, each as heavy as a brick, Gao looks and sounds like most other students on this Monday morning. Her English is polished, having a barely discernible accent that seems to diminish with each subsequent word she speaks. This is perhaps the only trace she has left of her native China, the country she left to pursue an education in the United States.